Foremerge - Catch Intent Conflicts Between Parallel Coding Agents
Show HN: Foremerge – Catch Intent Conflicts Between Parallel Coding Agents
Foremerge is an open-source coordination protocol built above Git that catches intent conflicts before code conflicts. When multiple AI coding agents work in isolated worktrees, Git can't warn you when their plans collide—like one agent replacing a service while another extends it. Foremerge lets agents declare what they're about to touch, shares that intent through a local SQLite store, and raises explainable, deterministic advisories before any code is written. Install it in under five minutes via Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, and keep your agents coordinated without locks or model-based judgment.
Git compares text, not intent. Foremerge fixes this by having agents announce what they are about to do, before they do it—so you see collisions before they land.
- adityamishra241
This is interesting. How do you decide whether a detected conflict is actually worth stopping the agent for? I imagine some overlapping changes could still be perfectly fine.
- naw103
Here are some questions I normally get asked:
What does an agent do with it?
The agents publish intents and scopes of what they are about to change (at the start and right before they make the change if its something different). Foremerge returns a signal of related work already in progress on different worktrees (even across different branches or in the same worktree) and the agents/humans who are working on it. Agents can then negotiate on the solution prior to writing any code or generating any conflicts and Foremerge runs an acceptance check (defined by a human) prior to commit.
Why advisory claims instead of locks?
Once a repo gets busy locks turn into a queue and deadlocks. A lock that the agent cant see the reason for is the worse case scenario so the hard gate is at the acceptance not the start.
What are the gaps?
Ultimately Foremerge is deterministic (does not use any judge model) so it can detect some false positives and negatives though we see that very infrequently and worst case it would have likely of been missed anyway without Foremerge. Acceptance also dosnt currently compare the actual diff by default and there are no push notificiations so the earlier agent only learns about the conflict on its next status check (both of these are on the roadmap for the next version)
There are more questions and answers here: https://foremerge.com/blog/31-questions-coordinating-paralle...
- ttoinou
I'm curious to know what's everyone custom solution to this problem ? Before AI and with AI.
It was already a problem for me before agentic AI coding : multiple developers can work on overlapping code and you always need someone to merge everything properly. Even if the overlap is very small it does add a burden to development. Not an issue anymore in 95% of cases if that person uses AI to solve conflicts, but now that "others developers" are swarm of AI agents, this problem isn't trivial to solve.